The future of performance management in the works

Jan 1, 2013

When it comes to engaging and retaining top talent, corporate performance management tools play an important role, more than just watching to see if a person is doing his or her job when they should be. These tools can indicate when a worker is struggling or excelling, what tasks certain individuals thrive at, if groups aren't working well together or if specific infrastructure is making it hard for a large number of people to perform job tasks.

Tapping into these solutions is easy and vital for most companies today, but in doing so, HR personnel need to know that they will be more accountable for corporate success than ever before. With tools like analytics based performance management at their fingertips, there's no excuse for failure.

Considering the diversity of modern workplaces, there is more to engagement than just trying to offer employees more money on an irregular basis. What counts is genuine care and interaction, an investment in the psychological and emotional well being of personnel and a sensation that the tasks a person carries out are actually integral to the ongoing operations at a company. These factors may add up to engagement, but that aspect is expressed in terms of productivity and quality of services, as well as loyalty to a company, which add up to better revenues when balanced appropriately.

As Forbes pointed out, the future of corporate performance management will be motivated by the changing tides of technology itself. Mobile deployments allow companies to move information more quickly even than just using computers, facilitating even more rapid management of document workflow. Cloud computing also makes reviewing these systems more speedy and fluid, and as one of the leading communication methods for sharing corporate files, it also has allowed for greater flexibility in the workplace than ever before.

Workers want different things as well, HR Reporter wrote, and are no longer satisfied by incentive pay or basic employment benefits. Staff members want to be challenged and given opportunities to show their strengths. They also want recognition from management and other workers for the things they do. Mostly, though, they want to feel like they can count on their positions to be stable for the future, even with the recession starting to ebb into the past. Things like the fiscal cliff could see major negative feedback with analytics based performance management, as more workers take the impending tax changes and healthcare cost increases as potentially jeopardizing their jobs.

Companies are expected to perform at higher standards than ever to keep up with the competition, and part of that is catering to in-house workforces to ensure the best possible productivity and service they can achieve. So long as businesses give their people what they want, they may improve output through use of corporate performance management tools, monitoring what actions make people happiest and boost performance the highest.